The investigation will look into allegations of momentary loss of braking power while travel ling over uneven road surfaces.

As depressing the brakes further activated normal braking, Toyota said the glitch was not legally a safety hazard and said it had received no reports of any accidents related to it.

‘Very disappointed’

Mr Fonseca told the BBC that the braking problem was “not a defect, but a characteristic of the way the ABS system is tuned”, before adding that there had been “no issues with this in the UK”. However, he did say that “we are very disappointed to have let customers down and accept that we could have handled [the problem] better.”